Day 3 – Touchline Instructions

As I slowly start to get grips with the world of blogging, my team have finally started to perform the way I want them two! How long that will last will more than likely decide the outcome of my season. With swine flu now on the way out, my motivation and energy to play the game is most certainly on the way back. Today will be much like yesterday, and every other day of the blog to come, providing there is a enough new stuff to write about! I should of really covered this in day one, but I haven’t really needed to use it that much up into this point. I am talking about the touchline instructions and shortcuts that have been introduced to the match day experience. You no longer have to revert back to your team instructions and move a couple of sliders around to change the way your team are playing.

I knew quite a while before the demo was released that we would be getting touchline instructions and I was delighted at the fact, they had been needed for a long, long time. I first set my eyes on the new setup in my first game against my reserves, probably not the best game to road test this new feature as I found out, but I still got the chance to take a look at the execution of the concept.

As I tuned into the 3D elevated view to check out the new stadium graphics, I noticed the touchline instructions button in the top left hand corner. After clicking on it I was immediately impressed with the extensive set of instructions you were given to choose from, much like the player definitions addressed yesterday, Sports Interactive have certainly not held back with this. Not only were there dozens of instructions to pick from, they all looked useful. I had the basic stuff like ‘Push Up, ‘Retain Possession’ and ‘hassle the opponents’ but I was also given a series of more complex instructions such as ‘Work The Ball Into The Box’ and ‘Play The Ball Into Space’, I have to say I was not expecting anywhere near the quantity or quality when it came to this addition. We are all quick to jump on backs of SI when they get something wrong, maybe its time to credit them for this superb new feature, or should we give it a more thorough test first?

It was time to put the touchline instructions in to use and see if they actually work! After walking through a couple of games I had a crunch game with West Brom at the riverside and although I expected to win, I never expected to win easily. The game kicked off, I popped on my analytical hat and looked for any reason to change the way we were playing. I soon realised that we were playing route 1 far to much, we needed to get the ball into feet and try to pass our way into a chance, rather than just pumping the ball up to the ever present head of Jonas Olsson . I scrolled down my instructions list and found the two perfect options to select. I casually closed the instructions list and sat back in my chair watching to see if my team started playing any differently. My concentration was interrupted as the ball got kicked out of play, the game paused and I was told we were making tactical changes! I thought the instructions were going to be instantaneous, as in me pressing the instruction was mirroring me bellowing out the instructions live to the players from the edge of the managerial box. I thought wrong, the game still stopped to re-adjust the tactics and I still had to wait until the game was stopped before the instruction would be launched. I have to be honest here, I was disappointed. Although it was still much better than stopping the game and editing your tactics, it still didn’t feel as fluid as I had wanted.

Moving on to the impact of my instructions, I did see some change in the way the team were playing. Sean St Ledger starting playing as more of a ball playing defender as he attempted to pass the ball from the back, rather than launching it long. We started knocking the ball around long and before long, a short one-two on the edge of the box put Leroy Lita through to slot it home. I was quietly pleased with my self, I noticed what we were doing wrong, told the players to do this and that and it payed off! Now it was time to keep hold of the ball and not get silly. I re-opened the instructions list, found the right option and instigated the deployment process. While I was there, I also changed our philosophy to ‘contain’ which is used to frustrate the opposition by keeping hold of the ball. We managed to hold on to lead to win 1-0, I was very happy with the result and I was happy with the effectiveness of the touchline instructions.

As you can probably tell by the ever descending tone of the article in the last paragraph, I wasn’t as ‘delighted’ as I originally was with the touchline instructions. The big problem last year for me was the fact you had to stop the game and open up your original team instructions, just to get your team playing further up the pitch; This was instead of being able to shout out an instruction on to the pitch whilst the game is going on. 3/4s of what I wanted has been achieved with this new system. As I mentioned right at the beginning of the article, the sheer amount of instructions you have to choose from is brilliant and the quality and usefulness of most of them has been very well thought out. The only thing wrong with this new system is the fact you still have the delay between issuing the instruction and it actually being deployed. If a manager wanted his team to push up, he would scream towards his central defender and tell him take control. I was hoping it would be more fluid and more natural, but I suppose nothing can be perfect. I hope my points have not been misunderstood as I think this is a great little feature that will certainly improve the match day experience for me. I think SI have pulled this off, despite the one Issue I still have it.